Fintech News Issue #181
August 30th, 2018

This week is all about the number five. 5 technology trends, 5 ways to accelerate digital transformation and 5 ways AI is changing banking. That's a mere 15 facts to keep in mind this week – it won't get any easier than that.
Michael and the FinTech Weekly team

Becoming a truly digital financial institution is daunting. The challenges loom large — especially the dreaded "silos" and the difficulty of changing long-standing culture. But a clear understanding of the challenges and of what will be required to meet them lays the groundwork for incremental progress. Here is a series of actions banks and credit unions must take to break out of a status quo that soon will no longer be viable.

Artificial intelligence has been a focus of discussions at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, over the past few years, so the organization decided to partner with Deloitte Consulting on a study that sought to "cut through the sensationalism surrounding AI" and offer helpful insights for business leaders and policymakers.

The banking industry is experiencing disruption at an increasing pace. Over the past few years, traditional financial institutions and non-traditional fintech firms have begun to understand that collaboration may be the best path to long-term growth. At the same time, big tech firms are offering financial services, creating techfin solutions.

Digital disruption, fintech infiltration, big tech competition, or even new technologies such as artificial intelligence seem daunting. Yet the most serious threat to banks and credit unions lies closer to home but remains more difficult to address — because it is ingrained in almost every traditional financial institution.

A few weeks ago I had one of those holidays that should have been simple but ended up requiring military levels of planning to get from one place to the next. Part of the reason for this is the fallacy of interconnectedness when it comes to travel, as anyone who doesn’t live in a capital city already knows and anyone, like me, trying to travel between two popular destinations finds out.

With blockchain platforms being tested for various business processes, prospective enterprise users that are unwilling to accept a volatile cryptocurrency will often complain that a key piece is missing from the platform: a stable, digital medium of exchange.

You need not be a technology guru to recognize that an outage or loss of service of any type or any length of time is simply not acceptable for today’s financial organization. Advance notices of planned system downtime, even during the wee hours of the morning, are less and less tolerated, especially given today’s global economy. What is the middle of the night in one geography are prime business hours in another.

I just caught a clip from the BBC about Decentraland, a virtual world where you can buy plots of land and next year become part of a virtual world. This world will be owned by its community, has no central authority, is completely decentralised and will flourish in the net. So far it’s users to buy 90,000 plots of land at a value of $28 million. Today, some plots of land are selling for almost $1 million each. Incredible. Here’s the clip:

It took five researchers to come up with the following:
“The persistence of the large number of local bank branches across the country may be due to the fact that both depositors and small businesses continue to value local bank branches.”
Brilliant.